Saturday, 3 September 2011

Hello guys, I must admit I have been remiss about posting to the site. The reason for this was drains. Or more properly, sewage drains. They didn’t work. We had to dig them, and then during this period of hard graft, lightning hit and our Internet died.

Well, now the internet has resumed life.

What has been happening in the garden recently? Well, we have been picking up tomatoes and other vegetables. They are delicious. Unfortunately, we are coming to the harvesting section of the year. During the hiatus we managed to pick millions of currents – red and black – blackberries, and raspberries.

Now, as the first mist has come this morning it almost seems as if we are at the end of they year.

We are redesigning the vegetable portion of our garden. For some years this has been a little bit of a hodgepodge. With small, windy grass paths, and beds slightly too large to weed properly. So, work is being carried out. The first stage is to dig, dig as though life depends on it. At the moment the ground is very hard. But we are expecting it to soften this week, as rain is forecast.

Once the ground is dug, we will have a near allotment sized plot.

At that stage, we will make paths, and work out some crop rotation for it. This has always been our weak spot. We like a relatively small selection of vegetables, and because of this we have not always done crop rotation correctly. Not according to the book, anyway.

This will probably continue. At least for some time. But, we are eating more greens – kale, spinach, and lettuce this year – and this offers some hope for better rotation.

That is one aspect of our gardening. The other aspect is making use of the orchard – getting in apples, stewing them, and freezing them. We hope that this will allow us to eat our own produce for the next year. We are missing sloe’s, but have picked a huge amount of pears that will ripen slowly over the next few weeks.

I think that summarizes this period of the year – still harvesting the last of the summer vegetables, clearing beds, weeding, and not enough time.

One thing you really do notice, I think, is the way that the sunlight is drawing in. We are losing around five minutes a day at the moment. So, I hope you understand why this blog will be short and sweet.